Blog : Thanksgiving

Halloween is a stupid, fake holiday. There, I said it. It’s absolutely the worst fake holiday there is. I’ll take Sweetest Day over it, and I don’t even know when said day occurs. Easter is a great holiday, even if my wife tells me it has pagan roots, just like Christmas. Both of those Holidays are not universally adored, because both are Christian holidays heavily connected in tradition and procedure to the aforementioned pagan celebrations. Labor Day is nice, but is it? Memorial Day is something everyone can get behind, but this isn’t a Holiday with a season so much as a long weekend. Holidays, they’re confusing, and they’re different for each of us. Well, except one Holiday. The King of Holidays, Thanksgiving.

There is no one alive who wishes for Thanksgiving to go away. Try to even imagine such a person. Even Ebenezer Scrooge was well known to enjoy a Thanksgiving turkey, even while he displayed open disdain for the Christmas Goose. See, everyone likes Thanksgiving. Even Canadians and people who willingly vacation in Michigan. Thanksgiving is the one weekend when everyone is in disagreement over something said at the table, or over the way something was prepared (my mom shouldn’t cook her turkey in an oversized crock pot), but when everyone is also in agreement. Thanksgiving is the best. That’s undisputed.

But what is thanksgiving? Not the capital T holiday, but the lower case t act? If we’re thankful, which we know we should be, to whom are we to be thankful? I admit I struggle with being thankful. I have a very hard time balancing being content and striving for more. I don’t know where the balance is. If I’m grateful and thankful, does this mean I’m content? It should, I think. But I admit that I am not. Ask my wife. I’m not predisposed to contentment, even if I am predisposed to be thankful. Indeed, shouldn’t one require the other? This is my personal struggle, the feeling of a unique form of driven anxiety coupled with an understanding that my life, while far from perfect, has been pretty, pretty, pretty good.

Today, my children are healthy. My son is addicted to some Starwars video game, and my daughter hates homework, but things are, on balance, good. My wife is struggling with an unfortunate deer hunting incident from last weekend, wherein she was an unwilling accomplice to Buck murder, but that’s a story for another time once the wound isn’t so fresh. Her figurative wound, not the Buck’s mortal wound. That wound isn’t fresh anymore. But still, my wife is well and my kids are well and I love them all dearly. I almost wrote deerly, in reference to the murdered Buck, but I didn’t think you’d get the joke.

This week, like every week, I’m going to try to be more thankful. To be more understanding. To be less frustrated and more content. This week, like every week, I’ll fail. But I adore Thanksgiving, and the way it brings a family together to give thanks for the many blessings that have been dropped squarely into our unworthy laps. The thing is, while my family will have disagreements and spats this weekend (like every week), we know to whom we are thankful. And that’s really what this Holiday is all about. We’ll enjoy this week and keep with us an attitude of thankfulness to the bestower of these blessings.

Photo Courtesy Matt Mason Photography.

I’ve written it often. So often, in fact, that it probably doesn’t seem like I’ve written it at all. It’s about perspective, this life of ours. It’s about perspective gained and lost, both usually on the same day, in the same moment, the same circumstance. I admit I lose perspective on a daily basis, and that admission might be the most important admission anyone could ever make. Aside from repentance, I suppose. But perception is the thing that matters most, and the problem with a Lake Geneva real estate focused life is that perspective is easily and often lost.

I saw a young child yesterday, handicapped in a most horrific way. I couldn’t tell how old the girl was, perhaps four, maybe six, but she was handicapped and unable to enjoy anything. Something happened when she was a baby, something terrible, and the consequences of whatever that was have become her life. She will never be dropped off for school, she will never be yelled at for fighting with her brother. Her parents will never feel immeasurable pride when she makes a winning shot in a basketball game she’ll never play. By her side was her mother, but not her birth mother. The mother who adopted her, the mother who knew full well what she was signing up for. A lifetime as a caregiver to a child who could never repay the favor.

I bought a new chainsaw yesterday. It’s a really great chainsaw. I bought it because my old chainsaw broke, and who could live for so long without a properly functioning, high CC chainsaw? I bought the saw and drove it home and placed it inside the cargo bed of my new Gator. I looked at the set up with tremendous pride. That’s my life. That’s my pathetic, insignificant life. A shiny plastic chainsaw brought me joy, and I hadn’t even yet pulled it to a roaring start.

Today, there’s another closing. Another event to spoil me with rewards that I don’t feel I’ve really earned. Another day where I can focus on the whims of the wealthy, and then buy myself a toy as a treat. What a terrible cycle to be caught up in. What a terrible thing to not see the immeasurable blessings in a life that has been more full than empty. A life that has every chance to be whatever I’d like it to be. A life that finds my wife and children contented and safe, a life where the sacrifices are measured in CCs on a chainsaw. Today, let’s be thankful. Tomorrow, too. Let’s be thankful that we live charmed lives, even when we think they’re anything but. Let’s be thankful that real people, people better than us, adopt children who wouldn’t otherwise be loved. Let’s be thankful for our particular brand of trouble, knowing it’s really nothing at all.

Even when it seems to me that there are lots of cars here, there aren’t really lots of cars. They meander past heading to one direction or from the other, minding their lanes and watching their speed. The men of the morning pull into the gas station to fill up their trucks and their gas tanks, to power their days of digging or plowing or cutting and clearing. They do this every morning while I sit here and watch it unfold. It’s always the same. The seasons change, the white I see now will be greenish and brown by next week, but who knows what the week after that brings. It might be snow or it might be rain, or it might be double nickel and sunny, there’s no way to know. The sky today is soft and blue, the air still. There’s a storm of sorts brewing on some plain somewhere, but it isn’t here today, so the men fill their gas tanks and I sit and type. Every day.
It might be that the world sees this as boring. That my life, here at this keyboard and there in the seat of that car, and later in front of a fire, that this is somehow boring and unexciting. They see this place, this Wisconsin and Midwest, and they wonder what it is that we do here, and why we choose to do it. There is so much more out there, they say, mountains and oceans and different people and different cultures. There is more out there, more than there could ever be here. This is why kids grow up in Williams Bay and then, in large numbers, kids move from Williams Bay. They move to small cities and to large cities, they move to other countries or to other counties, they move places where they can see different things and learn about different ways. They spend time here in this incubator and then, when ready, they catch the first flight to somewhere else. Only later do they wish that their somewhere else would be a little more like this place.

It’s not hard for me to be thankful. It’s hard to act in a way that proves it, but it isn’t hard to think it and to understand it. This life is a privileged life. I do not toil in salt mines, though some days I think it would be better to do so, because at the end of a day I’d have a nice, large pile of salt and someone would come by and commend me for my incredibly large, magnificent mound. I do not travel across the country weekly, missing my family and selling something to someone, sleeping on hotel mattresses and eating continental breakfasts of Fruit Loops and microwaved eggs. I live four miles from this desk, and in the morning I wake and drive with my kids to the East, two miles. I drop them at their small school, they walk down the sidewalk the same way every day, though some days my daughter dresses like an Indian and my son carries the weight of a basketball game loss on his still young shoulders. I drop them and drive out of the lot, passing people I know, heading still to the East, another two miles to my office where this long desk and small keyboard await. If I drove another sixth of a mile to the East, I’d find myself in the lake. My entire life plays out along one four mile stretch of road, and for that, I’m thankful.

The kids who moved far from here a long time ago will be back in town tonight. They’ll drive the routes they know, marvel at what has changed and remark that nothing has. They’ll tell their kids about their old school, about their old hangouts, about the old baseball fields and basketball courts. They’ll tell stories of school operettas and foursquare lunch breaks. They’ll spend some time here and then they’ll leave, and on Monday I’ll drive four miles to this office, which is one half mile from where I grew up, and I’ll be thankful that nothing has changed.

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